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Mapquest Offers Developers a New, Free Mapping Platform

By Scott Gilbertson March 10, 2008 Categories: Platforms & APIs, Programming

mapquest.jpgMapquest is finally beginning to see the “free” light. The company recently announced a new set of developer APIs (dubbed “MapQuest Platform: Free Edition”) to compete with similar APIs from Google and Yahoo.

In many ways Mapquest is a classic story of failure to adapt — the once king of online mapping has seen Google and Yahoo surpass it, if not yet in traffic, at least in developer tools and attention. And that means, down the road, the other two are likely to surpass Mapquest in traffic as well.

We criticized Mapquest’s lack of a robust, free API back when the company announced a new, but pricy, ActionScript API. Recently, however, the company seems to have had a change of heart and is even being refreshingly honest about its failures. A post of the developer blog recently admitted:

Yeah, yeah, we know. Over the past few years we know it seemed that on the outside MapQuest seemed a bit behind the times, a Web 1.0 giant sitting on the bench of a Web 2.0 Internet. However, inside MapQuest there have been people hard at work trying to change our culture and perspective into something that can thrive in a “Web 2.0” world. We’ve been changing teams, processes, some developers switched to Macs — serious, real change.

As part of the new free Mapquest Platform, the company is offering API libraries in six languages — Java, C++, .NET, JavaScript, ActionScript 3 and something Mapquest calls FUJAX. FUJAX is short for Flash Under JavaScript and XML, and essentially allows you to write in JavaScript but display Flash maps.

The Mapquest free platform has a host of other services available including a very useful looking set of geocoding methods which allow developers to do single or multi-line geocoding, real-time batch geocoding, postal code and town geocoding, as well as reverse geocoding.

While the mapping services from Google and Yahoo have something of a head start when it comes to developer support and API robustness, Mapquest is closing that gap quite quickly and even has the others beat in some areas. If you’re looking to add some mapping capabilities to your site, Mapquest’s new free platform is definitely worth a look.

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